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Canada got the last hurrah at the Celebration of Light Saturday evening, closing the three-night event with a winning display. Canada was declared the winner of the event, with Brazil and China finishing second and third, respectively.

VANCOUVER — A lot goes into making an Olympic athlete. In Dylan Armstrong’s case, as much as 9,000 calories per day.

Long before he could throw a shot put about as far as anyone on Earth, the strapping boy from Kamloops could eat. And drink. That “Got Milk?” advertisement could have been based on the Armstrong household, where Dylan and his little brother, David, faced off across the dinner table.

“There was a grocery store right behind our street,” Judy Armstrong, the boys’ mother, laughed Wednesday when asked about Dylan’s early diet. “I used to go over there and carry these big jugs of milk home. I joke that I’ve got one arm longer than the other from carrying home all the milk. They’d come home from sports and I’d say, ‘OK, you can’t drink all the milk.’ I used to stand in front of the fridge and say, ‘That’s enough.’ ”

“When I think back, we ate massive amounts of food,” Armstrong said. “I was a growing boy. We used to get crazy on Sunday mornings. My buddies would come over and we’d cook up like 60 eggs, eat two packs of bacon, stuff like that.”

When Dylan left home to become a track and field star in Europe, the second saddest person in Kamloops must have been the manager of Cooper’s Foods.

Apparently, Armstrong got milk elsewhere.

The 6-4 31-year-old, a world championship silver medallist and a favourite for Canada at this summer’s London Olympics, weighs 345 pounds.

So when Armstrong agreed to attend Wednesday’s press conference promoting the Harry Jerome International Track Classic at Swangard Stadium on June 10, one of the organizers, former Olympian and cookbook author Diane Clement, figured it would be a good idea to hook up Armstrong with some food.

And we tagged along because, like a NASCAR race, you never know what might happen. Someone who weighs a sixth of a tonne must be almost as exciting in a restaurant as a shot put ring.

Darren Brown, executive chef at Oru in the Fairmont Pacific Rim hotel, prepared a bunch of Armstrong’s favourites: beets, broccoli, strip loin steak and cheesecake. And, just because, Brown’s pastry chef managed to make a chocolate hand cradling a chocolate shot put, and the orb didn’t appear to be far off the regulation weight of 16 pounds.

We thought maybe there would be furniture broken and forks bent or at least some butter-splattered bystanders. But Armstrong, just back from three straight wins in Europe, dined with dignity, politely sampling Brown’s fare before pushing himself away from the table.

“You have to have some mass there; you are throwing a 16-pound shot put,” Armstrong said of his body. “But you need some speed as well. You don’t want to be too light and you don’t want to be too heavy. I’ve kind of found my medium weight.

“I need anywhere from 6,500 to 9,000 calories [per day]. It’s up there. But it’s easy to eat a lot of calories. I like a lot of salmon. Obviously, beef and chicken. I’m on a high-protein, low-carb diet. I’ll eat five or six times a day. I’m more of a grazer. I try to eat healthy. It does help performance.”

And, lest you think Armstrong is just some fatty who can launch a steel sphere like NASA, he was also a high jump star when he wasn’t playing high school football. He cleared 1.90 metres — about his height — back when he weighed only 245 pounds. That was a lot of mass defying gravity.

“When you’re training hard, you’re always hungry,” Armstrong said. “Your body wants energy, wants food. I’ll eat, but you can’t eat too, too much. Speed does matter and I have to be light on my feet. I could put on tonnes of muscle mass and get really, really big, but that’s not good for what I’m doing. I still need to be dynamic and be able to move across the ring.

“I lose weight on the road. It’s tough because you’re in different countries, different foods. And the travel ... one year I did 23 overseas flights. Sometimes you just have to make due. I love Germany, the Czech Republic, Poland. The food’s a little heavier and lot of good meat.”

Armstrong said if he could choose only one food the rest of his life it would be steak, and his personal-best is a 50-ounce slab consumed at a Texas steak house.

No, he said, his picture does not hang on the restaurant’s wall. Eating a three-pound chunk of cow isn’t such a big deal in the U.S.

Armstrong’s mom thinks her son loves soup more than anything, and told how at the Beijing Olympics in 2008 Dylan had a big, steaming bowl of soup even as asphalt was melting in the heat. Armstrong finished fourth, missing a medal by one centimetre.

“He used to have a huge bowl of cereal before he went to bed,” Judy said. “But he wouldn’t use the regular bowls, he’d use a salad bowl or a mixing bowl. I was also very careful not to have the sugary cereal.

“I used to make chocolate-chip cookies and [the boys] would go into the freezer and eat them frozen. Whatever they could get their hands on.

“Dylan always loved to eat. He was home for 15 hours the other day and I hadn’t seen him since Boxing Day. He said: ‘Mom, can you poach me two eggs?’ Well, two eggs ended up being six.”

So the breakfast of champions isn’t a box of Wheaties, although that makes a good bedtime snack.

Even at 3½ bills, Armstrong looks athletic – not exactly trim, but certainly not fat.

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